Energy companies will invest $7 billion this year in operations focused on the Niobrara rock formation that lies thousands of feet under five active oil and gas basins in Wyoming and Colorado, according to a recent assessment by research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

The consulting firm reached its figure by totaling up capital expenditure announcements for 2014 by oil and gas companies drilling into the Niobrara formation in the five basins — a list that includes Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg Basin, said Ryan Duman, a Houston-based research analyst for the firm.

Duman talked to the Denver Business Journal earlier this week.

Four of the five basins in Wood Mackenzie's report are in Colorado. The basins covered are:

The Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin, which sprawls north and east of Denver into Wyoming and Nebraska;

The North Park Basin in Jackson County, Colorado;

The Piceance Basin in western Colorado;

The Sand Wash and Greater Green River Basin, which lie on both sides of the Colorado-Wyoming border; and

The Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming.

“Obviously, a high, high majority of that spending will be in the DJ Basin — especially with the work that Anadarko [Petroleum Corp.] and Noble [Energy Inc.] are doing,” Duman said.

“They’re leading the drilling and spending up there,” he said.

And Wood Mackenzie’s 2014 investment estimate for the Niobrara may be low.

The assessment only included capital expenditure announcements from oil and gas companies that drill and operate wells. It didn’t include announcements from midstream companies building processing plants or other companies working to bring the oil and natural gas liquids to market via rail or pipeline, Duman said.

For instance, Denver’s DCP Midstream, the biggest natural gas processing company working in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, is building a new plant, called the Lucerne 2 plant, that’s capable of handling up to 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. The plant is expected to start operations in the second quarter of 2015.

The Lucerne 2 project comes on the heels of DCP opening up its newest plant, the O’Connor Plant near Kersey, Colo., in October 2013.

DCP built the O’Connor plant to initially handle up to 110 million cubic feet per day of natural gas.

The plant was operating at full capacity as soon as it started, and the company is now starting to bring on the plant’s 50 million cubic feet per day expansion capacity, DCP said in early February.

With booming oil and gas operations in the DJ Basin, Colorado’s 2013 oil production broke a record that had stood since 1956.

And as the Denver Business Journal reported Tuesday, between the two companies, the estimated amount of crude oil the DJ is expected to produce over its lifetime has climbed to at least 4.1 billion barrels of oil and natural gas liquids.

Anadarko said it expects to invest $1.5 billion in the basin this year. Noble said it expects to invest about $2 billion in the basin this year, and $12 billion during the next five years.

The Denver-Julesburg Basin has been drilled since the 1970s, but in the last few years, the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has boosted the amount of crude oil produced from new wells.

“For a play that was only starting to be drilled in 2010, it’s been pretty cool to see that growth,” Duman said.

Other big shale basins also are getting big investments, according to Wood Mackenzie’s assessment.

The Eagle Ford, in Texas, is expected to draw about $23 billion in investment in 2013, Duman said.

And the Bakken oil play in North Dakota is expected to draw about $15 billion in investment, he said.